65 entries categorized "Racism"

May 27, 2015

A Black man who had suffereda stroke was shot with a Taser and pepper spray because he was unable to get out of his car as a Virginia cop ordered. A Cleveland cop was found not guilty in the 137 bullets trial. From coast to coast police are too quick to pull the trigger. Here's my Chicago Defender column on the situation.

Lethal or nonlethal, same shoot, different day

By Monroe Anderson

When it comes to white cops shooting unarmed Blacks, the hits just keep on coming. So do the misses.

A viral video-surfaced last week that featured David Washington’s turn at taking the hit. The 34-year-old Black man was shot by a Taser then hit by a stream of pepper spray for failing to get out of his car on demand.

Washington was both lucky and unlucky. Lucky because Fredericksburg Police Officer Shaun Jergens shot him with the Taser and pepper sprayed him, leaving him short of breath and with his eyelids swollen closed, instead of aiming a couple of lead slugs at his head. Not that he didn’t threaten to.

“Get out the car,” Jergens yelled after assaulting Washington,“ or I’m going to f--king smoke you.”

Washington was unlucky because he had just suffered a stroke and was in need of medical care not an instant application of tough policing for sitting in a car while Black.

As for the miss, this time it was in Cleveland. In the hometown of Tamir Rice, who would have turned 13 years old next month if he hadn’t been shot to death by Officer Timothy Loehmann while playing cops and robbers in a city playground, justice was on the lam.

Apparently, like Agent 007, America’s police have a license to kill. Michael Brelo, a Cleveland cop, was acquitted Saturday of charges of voluntary manslaughter in the “137 bullets” case for the shooting deaths Timothy Russell, 43, and Malissa Williams, 30.

Why is it that cops tasked with serving and protecting routinely see Blacks as the usual suspects before rendering us the usual victims? Why are some police so prone to shoot first, before coming up with answers later? Is innocent until proven guilty a whites only right?

Both Officers Brelo and Jergens suffered from that epidemic that has stricken too many men in blue across the nation: Trigger Finger-itis.

Jergens shot Washington with his Taser as the incapacitated driver sat in his car facing the wrong way on the street because he assumed the Black man was the perpetrator in a hit-and-run accident. The sick man mattered so little to Cleveland police that after he was assaulted by Jergens, he was thrown, handcuffed on the hot pavement while they allowed a police car to roll over one of his feet.

Of course, white cops abusing Black men is nothing new. But the Taser has become Officer-Not-So-Friendly’s high-tech billy club. Back in the day, many a cop’s knee-jerk reaction was to beat a Black man bloody before taking him to the station. In this modern age, rather than crack open their heads, the practice is to hit them with a 50,000 volts of electricity instead.

In 2012, an American Heart Association report linked stun gun use to heart attacks and deaths. There are real-life tragedies to underscore those findings. Last year, 60 Americans died from Tasers. Since they’ve become the “nonlethal” weapon of choice for police worldwide more than 600 people have died from them in the past 14 years.

While Tasers may or may not amount to deadly force, bullets certainly do.

Both unarmed, Russell and Williams were killed on November 29, 2012 after officers mistook the sound of his 1979 Chevy Malibu backfiring as gunshots. Since dead men or women tell no tales, we will never know what led to the 62- police vehicle high speed chase across Cleveland. It is known that 137 bullets struck the Malibu that the two occupants were in. Forty-nine of those shots came from Officer Brelo’s Glock 17. He squeezed off 15 of the rounds as he stood on the car, both it and its passengers motionless, as if he was making his day in a sequel to Dirty Harry.

Ohio Judge John O'Donnell ruled Saturday that Officer Brelo acted within his constitutional rights. In his ruling, the judge explained that since 12 other Cleveland police--eleven white, one Hispanic--had fired shots as well, there was no evidence beyond a reasonable doubt that any of the 23 bullets in Russell’s body was the one fired by Brelo that took the Black man’s life.

So Officer Brelo will not see a day behind bars for the deaths of an unarmed Black man and woman although he remains on leave without pay. No charges have been filed against Jergens for his abuse. But he was forced to resign from the force.

Who knows? Someday, maybe we’ll read about some cop actually doing the time for doing the crime.

May 14, 2015

Chicago police have set up a disproportionate amount of sobriety checkpoints in the black community. They also stopped and frisked the city's black residents at an alarming rate. This is just a couple of ways blacks Americans are burdened more than whites. But there is also an unfair economic burden...a Black Tax. Here's my Chicago Defender column on the subject.

The Black Tax toll is both big and small

By Monroe Anderson

Racism is so deeply embedded and routine in America that for many whites it’s nothing more than business as usual. For African Americans, however, racial discrimination exacts a toll, from being over-policed to being undervalued.

When the Chicago police decided to crack down on DUI violations and feed the city coffers with extra violation fines, they set up shop in the Black community. A Chicago Tribune investigation found that 84 percent of roadside sobriety checks were in African American or Hispanic police districts. The newspaper reported Sunday that between February 2010 and June 2014 Chicago police staged DUI checkpoints at 127 out of 152 in the city’s predominantly minority neighborhoods while fewer than four percent were in majority-white police districts--even though that is where one out of four of Chicago’s alcohol-related accidents and deaths occurred.

Chicago police also conducted a quarter of a million “stop-and-frisk” searches during the summer of 2014 that did not lead to an arrest, according to a finding by the American Civil Liberty Union of Illinois. Although Blacks represent less than a third of Chicago’s population, we were close to three-fourths of the stops.

In white neighborhoods, Blacks instantly became the usual suspects. In Jefferson Park, which is just one percent African American, we were 15 percent of all the stop-and-frisks. In the Near North District, where Blacks are less than 10 percent of the population, we were 60 percent of those stopped by Chicago police.

Police targeting Blacks is small change compared to some of the other ways African Americans in Chicago have been burdened with separate and unequal treatment.

Back when I was a Chicago Tribune reporter, I pitched the editors on our doing an investigative series we titled, after what it was called in the community, “The Black Tax.”

Our 1980 investigation uncovered a not-so-subtle but very real practice of economic discrimination: Blacks pay more to get less. We sought out bungalows on the city’s South and North sides that were virtually identical in appearance. We documented the fact that those owning the houses in Chicago’s Black neighborhoods paid as much as 80 percent more for home insurance than those owning bungalows in the city’s white neighborhoods.

We documented that car insurance cost more on the Black side of town than it did on the white side and that it was far more difficult to get home improvement loans in one neighborhood compared to the other for a reason. “Millions of dollars deposited by minority group members in most of their community banks and savings and loan associations have flowed to home loans in distant suburbs and only a few thousand dollars has been retained for neighborhood mortgage,” we reported.

We also discovered that living on the wrong side of Western Avenue, which served as a racial dividing line, came with a price tag of its own. The homeowners in the predominantly Black neighborhoods east of Western had 25 times as many Illinois FAIR Plan policies as the whites on the west side of the avenue. For those who are not homeowners or who are lucky enough to be insured by the likes of State Farm or Allstate, with the FAIR Plan, you pay higher rates for less coverage.

Over a lifetime, this Black Tax adds up to jaw-dropping inequities. White Americans have 13 times the net worth of Black Americans. In 2013, white household wealth was $141,900 while the net worth of the Black household was just $11,000. That’s without even factoring in job hiring and wage discrimination.

In some ways, Mayor Rahm Emanuel has been an equal opportunity taxer. He has exacted hidden taxes on Chicago’s Blacks and whites by jacking up water and sewer fees and vehicle sticker fees. He has also raised cable TV amusement taxes by $28.80 a year and 911 taxes on land line and cell phones by $16.80 a year.

The DUI checkpoints and police stops and frisks demonstrate that, in other ways, the mayor plays favorites.

It’s time for all those Black Chicagoans who, for whatever reasons, believed that Mayor Emanuel was their man to remind him that he owes them. They need to go tell the mayor that they want their just due.

I’m not talking about anything so grand as the $20 million he’s forking over to the Jon Burge torture victims. I’m thinking modest. How about he tells his police to quit stopping Blacks and browns on the streets or in checkpoints while focusing the color of their skin before fairly considering content of the character?

It should be a non-taxing thing to do for the mayor who says he knows how to get things done.

May 06, 2015

America's treatment of its urban Black youth has been anything but benign. Far too many of them have no jobs, no future and little to lose. Here's my take in the Chicago Defender.

Black teen unemployment comes with a price

By Monroe Anderson

This summer threatens to be long and hot. Not climate change hot but heated and angry, Baltimore Spring hot.

Three days ago, a Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll reported that 96 percent of us believe that there will be more racial disturbances as seen on TV.

After we see more episodes of police routinely showing up on the nightly news after they’ve killed yet another Black male, there will be more repeats of Black teens with little more than time on their hands and outrage on their minds acting out their frustration. We’ll see more squad cars stomped to death. More buildings going up in smoke. More stores ransacked and looted.

“A resounding 96% of adults surveyed said it was likely there would be additional racial disturbances this summer, a signal that Americans believe Baltimore’s recent problems aren’t a local phenomenon but instead are symptomatic of broader national problems,” the Journal reported.

That’s the Fourth Estate’s way of saying poor Black people are about to behave poorly and that while everybody knows it, not everybody knows why. So the opinions are about as racially divided as the nation. Sixty percent of Blacks saw the urban uprising as “long-standing frustrations about police mistreatment of African Americans,” while 58 percent of whites said the riots were "an excuse to engage in looting and violence.”

There are all sorts of evidence and reasons that underscore the Black interpretation while undermining the white one. There are also studies and events to inform us that the frustrations go far beyond the wanton and routine police killing of unarmed Black males to these core problems: No jobs, no hope.

There’s this year’s annual report released jointly by the Chicago Urban League and the Alternative Schools Network in January titled, “A Frayed Connection: Joblessness among Teens in Chicago,” revealed that In 2012-13, just one in ten of Chicago’s Black teens had a job--nine out of 10 did not.

“One half of 20-to 24-year old black male residents of the city are not working and not enrolled in school,” the report warned, adding that “Black teen employment rates in Chicago have reached historically low levels.”

A Kids Count policy report that was a dead ringer to the one in Chicago told the same sad story about young Black males in Baltimore in 2012, “unemployment among those ages 16 to 24 is the highest in the country since World War II.”

The Supreme Commander of the Allies during WWII, Dwight Eisenhower, in his farewell address as POTUS warned Americans about the future dangers of massive military spending, especially deficit spending and government contracts to private military manufacturers. The unemployed Black males are getting short-changed by the military-industrial complex Ike warned us about.

Less than two years after President Lyndon Johnson launched his ambitious War on Poverty in 1964, those resources were shifted to the war in Vietnam. A generation later, President Bill Clinton managed to downsize the military but Republicans later took their pound of flesh, forcing him to end the Summer Youth Employment and Training Program as a stand-alone initiative which resulted in 600,000 kids being laid off.

The bulk of today’s economic challenges in our urban areas can be traced directly back to President George W. Bush. The 43rd president’s surplus-busting wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, which were never in his administration’s budget, sucked up much of the tax dollars that had been returning to the cities and states.

Depending on who’s calculating those two wars have cost America between four and six trillion dollars. American commanders handed out $3.5 billion with next-to-nothing oversight to purportedly to rebuild the country we illegally invaded.

Meanwhile, back at home, our pavements feel like something out of a war zone. Our outdated bridges are in danger of collapsing. Our transportation system is last millennium. And, of course, our urban areas are teeming with Black men who want and need jobs that they can’t get.

In Chicago, Mayor Rahm Emanuel is making jobs available for 24,000 Chicago teens through his One Summer Chicago initiative. In the scheme of things, that’s not a big number.

Maybe all those other unemployed teens, will understand it’s the thought that counts. We’ll see soon enough. Summer is just around the corner.

May 01, 2015

Director Spike Lee will shoot a movie about black-on-black crime this summer in Chicago. The working title is Chiraq. That's Chicago and Iraq truncated into one word. Get it? Here's my Chicago Defender column on what Spike's movie should use as its metaphor.

Spike Lee’s Chiraq could be KKK

By Monroe Anderson

Mayor Rahm Emanuel may not care for the title of Spike Lee’s movie slated to start shooting this summer in Englewood, but as an artist, an out-of-towner and a show business man, “Chiraq” makes perfectly good sense for America’s most iconic Black director.

Popularized by Chief Keef, and other neo-gangster rappers in Chicago’s drill music set, the term Chiraq chronicles the violence in some of the city’s worst poverty pockets. Creating the phrase was a low-brainer, considering that when it comes to body count in Chitown’s most dangerous hoods- Fuller Park, Garfield Park and Englewood--more Blacks have been shot and killed on a year-to-year basis there than in war-torn Iraq.

Beyond that, Spike could certainly use a drive-by box office hit. In nearly a decade, the “Black Woody Allen” hasn’t able to do enough of the right thing to produce a feature film as relevant as director Ava Duvernay’s Selma or as entertaining as director Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained. A convincing argument could be made that in the past 20 years, the New York--based director has made only one smack down feature film, the 2006 The Inside Man, that can hold its own against his earlier efforts like She’s Got to Have It and Malcolm X.

While he made some memorable documentaries over the years, including 4 Little Girls, and the TV mini-series, When the Levees Broke, Lee’s feature-film efforts, such as Miracle of Saint Anna, Red Hook Summer and Oldboy, had more fizzle than sizzle.

A modern day Menace II Society might do the trick in reviving Lee’s career but I seriously doubt if Chiraq will do the trick partly because it’s based on a misleading premise.

Contrary to what gets reported on the nightly news or in screaming newspaper headlines, Chicago’s murder rate is on the decline. It’s the lowest it has been in more than four decades. According to rankings made by NeighborhoodScout.com, a website that markets itself as providing “Enterprise-grade data for every neighborhood and city in the U.S.” the Windy City isn’t even on its list of America’s Top 30 murder capitals. Downstate East St. Louis is number one. Two suburbs across state lines, Gary is number three and East Chicago is ranks number 15.

In making another stab at recapturing the ‘90s when his films’ shocked and awed viewers, Spike may be bringing too little, too late to the reality of Chicago’s Bronzeville, which is already showing signs of turning into D.C. or Harlem. No longer the Chocolate City, gentrification and incoming white flight, the Black population in the District of Columbia has slipped below 50 percent. Nor are Blacks the majority in Harlem anymore.

You can see it unfolding before your very eyes in Bronzeville. The hipsters are salting the South Side. They can be spotted walking their dogs, jogging or pushing their baby strollers on streets their parents and grandparents had either avoided or had forgotten.

You can trace it back to Mayor Richard M. Daley and his not so grand plan to transform Chicago into Paris. It was obvious with the flowers and the fences and the fancy hand operated sidewalk vacuums. It was clandestine with the razing of Cabrini Green and Robert Taylor Homes, which diluted the power of the city’s Black voting bloc and exiled the poor to, among other places, Gary, East Chicago and Harvey.

You can see why Chiraq is not the best title for what’s really happening here. So, I’ve got a better suggestion. I think Spike should look at the artwork of visual artist James Pate and either beg, borrow or buy his cutting edge artistic vision. A couple of years ago, Pate had a three-month exhibition at the DuSable Museum. Its title was KKK--Kin Killin Kin.

The detailed black and white drawings, beautiful yet powerful, were of boys from the hood, wearing Ku Klux Klan-like headgear with their black faces exposed or basketball jerseys with the initials KKK on them while pointing guns at each other’s heads. The bullets they fired were artistically frozen just before they entered each other’s heads.

That unnerving reality would make a much more powerful movie than a sequel to the Hughes brothers 1993 hit.

If Spike doesn’t want pursue the KKK metaphor, he can always change his filming location. Killadelphia won’t do because, like Chicago, the City of Brother Love’s murder rate is down. But Baltimore might work. It has killer cops and urban uprisings right now and, unfortunately, a high enough murder rate: Charm City ranks #13 on the Top Murder Capitols list.

Baltimore, courtesy of The Wire, has a controversial colloquialism just as good as Chiraq. That would be Bodymore, Murdaland.

April 15, 2015

At some point, policemen everywhere are going to realize that there are cameras everywhere. That what they do in public will stay in public...forever. So far, there are too many cops who haven't gotten the point. They continue to perform as cops did back in the good old days when cameras were an inconvenience to carry around. The following is my Chicago Defender column on the subject.

Shoot, cops caught on candid camera

By Monroe Anderson

Michael Slager is the latest cop to get caught on camera starring in America’s most alarming reality TV series ever: Trigger happy cops playing judge and jury, publicly executing unarmed Black males.

Officer Slager was too arrogant, too cold-blooded or too stupid to realize that we now live in the Era of the Candid Camera. You virtually can’t do anything, in public or private, with absolute certainty that it won’t be recorded and that it won’t go public.

There are porn sites dedicated to videos of ex-girlfriends performing some of the most intimate sexual acts imaginable posted by rejected men seeking revenge. There are spy cameras atop streetlight poles, speed cameras hanging out with overhead stop lights at street intersections and surveillance cameras in shops and stores, all aimed to capture and record anyone breaking the law. And there are heroes, like bystander Feidin Santana, who risk their safety to record cops, like Michael Slager, who choose to use living, breathing Black men, like Walter Scott, for target practice.

In the past few days, we’ve all seen what is nothing less than a snuff flick of Slager firing eight shots at a fleeing Scott, hitting him in the back five times, then handcuffing the 50-year-old man’s motionless body before retrieving and dropping, what is suspected to be, a Taser gun next to it.

The North Charleston cop wasn’t the only shooter featured this week in a viral video.

We also saw a 44-year-old Black man shot to death by a 73-year-old white man in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Robert Bates, an insurance executive, who volunteers as a reserve Tulsa County deputy sheriff, claims he mistakenly shot Eric Harris with his handgun, when he meant to shoot him with his Taser gun.

As Harris is tackled, lying face-down on the ground with a deputy’s knee pinning his head, a gunshot rings out and Bates says: "Oh, I shot him. I'm sorry."

A sunglass camera worn by one of the deputies recorded the video of Harris’ April 2nd arrest. Against the wishes of the Tulsa County Sheriff’s department, prosecutors charged Bates, a pay-to-play cop, with second-degree manslaughter. Slager has been charged with first-degree murder.

The Zion cop who shot and killed 17-year-old Justus Howell Easter weekend is on paid administrative leave. No cameras recorded the circumstances that resulted in Howell being shot twice in the back, allowing Zion police to come up with one of the usual explanations: The teenager had a handgun.

Eyewitnesses say they saw no weapon. An investigation is underway. No video has surfaced so the Zion police have caught a lucky break. Two-thirds of all Americans have smartphones, which means all but a third of us are now armed with cameras and dangerous to cops who still believe they can do what they’ve done to Black men for generations without notice or record.

On December 4, 1968, Fred Hampton, 21, was murdered by while asleep in his West Side apartment during a Chicago police raid. Mark Clark, 22, was also killed during the predawn raid where police fired 90-99 shots.

In 1972, never quite able to get over the killing of Hampton and Clark and incensed because Chicago police were harassing two friends and supporters, who were both dentists, Rep. Ralph Metcalfe broke away from Mayor Richard J. Daley, assembling a blue ribbon panel and issuing a congressional study the next year entitled “The Misuse of Police Authority in Chicago.”

Not much resulted from that report. Between 1972 and 1991, Detective Commander Jon Burge and his midnight crew, tortured 110 Black criminal suspects, forcing false confessions. Mayor Rahm Emanuel announced yesterday (Tuesday) that he backs a $5.5 million reparations package for Burge’s victims. And an ACLU report released last month found that last summer, when the NYPD’s stop and frisk practices were all the rage, the CPD made more than a quarter of a million stops that did not result in arrests--four times that of people stopped in New York.

The CPD continues to be suspect. Two days ago, federal authorities confirmed that the FBI is investing the death of Lequan McDonald, a 17-year-old who was shot down in a barrage of bullets. The Chicago teen allegedly was wielding a knife. A dashboard camera from a squad car recorded the action and the shooter has been reassigned to desk duty.

If I were to tell you that neither the Scott nor McDonald shooting would be a case if there weren’t moving pictures, would you take my word for it?

Well, here are a few more words for the wise: Justice is beautiful, but blindfolded. So always keep your smartphone charged in case you need to show her what is or is not happening.

April 01, 2015

Indiana's Religious Freedom law has triggered a spirited debate throughout the nation and may be the next right wing attack on civil rights. Here's my Chicago Defender Column on the controversy.

What’s bad for the gays will be bad for the Blacks

Monroe Anderson

Defender Columnist

If you haven’t been paying attention to the firestorm over Indiana’s “freedom of religion” law, it’s time that you do. Our neighboring state’s new legislation reflects Black America’s past and could easily come to mirror our future.

The bill is rightly being described as a license to discriminate. It allows anyone with a business to not do business with anyone they choose by claiming they believe it violates their religious values.

We’ve seen this play before.

God and religion have been used as the guiding principle in overt discrimination against Blacks throughout virtually all of our nation’s history. The KKK burned crosses before lynching Black men. Bigoted Christians cited the curse of Ham, the father of Canaan in Genesis, to justify slavery. “Blessed be the LORD God of Shem; and Canaan shall be his servant. God shall enlarge Japheth, and he shall dwell in the tents of Shem; and Canaan shall be his servant.”

Ham is believed to have been a Black man.

Unequal public schools for Blacks were the will of the Almighty opined Georgia Gov. Allen Candler in 1901, “God made them negroes and we cannot by education make them white folks.”

Nor did God cotton to miscegenation. Richard Loving, a white man, was sentenced to one year in prison for marrying Mildred Jeter, a Black woman. The couple had broken Virginia's law, the Racial Integrity Act of 1924, by going to Washington, D.C. to get married then naively returning to home.

Apparently the Lovings had broken the Holy Father’s law as well. “Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents,” wrote Judge Leon M. Bazile in his 1959 ruling. “The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix.”

Indiana’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act does not mention same-sex mixing but it’s arguably aimed at those with a certain sexual orientation. Last year, the same-sex marriage ban was overturned by a federal court. Some pouting proponents, who wanted the ban to stand, headed straight for the governor and the Indiana General Assembly to make sure there would be a freedom of religion law on guard to protect bigotry, as they knew it.

The state’s RFRA is yet another Republican head-fake where conservatives pretend that they’re not doing anything wrong while they’re definitely doing something wrong. Just like the GOP’s scheme to suppress Black participation at the ballot box through voter I.D. laws, the religious freedom law would allow business owners the right to use their faith as an excuse not to serve lesbians, gays, bisexuals and transsexuals, aka LGBTs--or hire or rent to them.

Black Americans know all too well how that game is played and if the new rules remain legalized then it won’t be long before it’s played on us. Again.

The legislation Gov. Pence signed last week prohibits state laws that “substantially burden” a religious institution, businesses and associations from following religious beliefs. The new law in effect serves as a legal shield for people, associations and businesses big and small from being sued for discrimination if they claim their religion made them do it.

The uproar that followed caught Indiana’s governor off guard. He reflectively characterized it as a battle between religious freedom and gay rights, assuming he knew who’d win that fight.

Gov. Pence, and his overly weighted Republican General Assembly, quickly discovered that they were wrong. Besides the sign-carrying LGBT protesters, Indiana’s state lawmakers heard disapproval from other states, businesses, sports organizations, future conventioneers and social media.

The CEOs from Eli Lilly and Co., Anthem and Indiana University Health were among nine of Indiana’s largest employers pointing out that discriminatory legislation was bad for business. Seattle’s mayor and Connecticut’s governor banned their employees from traveling to Indiana to do business. Indianapolis-based Angie’s List CEO announced that his company was going to halt plans for a $40 million expansion in the state’s capital. The president of NCAA, whose Final Four competition takes place in Indianapolis this weekend, said yesterday that Indiana's new "religious freedom" law goes against what higher education and America is all about. And there is, of course, a social media response: On Twitter the hashtag is #boycottindiana.

All that outrage has focused Gov. Pence’s mind like a hanging. He was claiming that Indiana’s RFRA law was no different from the one in Illinois and the other 18 states that passed one. Pence left out the part about those other states having a separate law that specifically protected LGBTs from discrimination, while his state does not. You can be fired in Indiana for being gay.

Over the weekend, he was asserting that the law wouldn’t be changed. Yesterday he held a press conference to announce that maybe it would. He’s having his legislature revamp the onerous law.

March 11, 2015

Half a century after the Selma March, race still matters in America as events in Selma, Alabama, Madison, Wisconsin and Norman, Oklahoma demonstrated. Here's my take in my Chicago Defender column

From Selma to Madison to Norman

MonroeAnderson

Defender Columnist

The march, a shooting and a song summed up this past weekend just how far this nation has gone and just how far it has yet to go.

The nation’s first African American president stood near the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma to mark the 50th anniversary of “Bloody Sunday,” one of the most important feats of the Civil Rights Movement. Out of the epic confrontation between forces of peace and progress and the agents of brute force, Blacks won the right to vote in the South.

“We just need to open our eyes and our ears and our hearts to know that this nation’s racial history still cast it’s long shadow upon us,” President Barack Obama told the integrated crowd of thousands who had gathered to commemorate, along with him, the Selma to Montgomery March. “We know the march is not yet over. We know the race is not yet won.”

As if to underscore the president’s point, some 898 miles north from Selma, in Madison, Wisconsin, another white cop shot and killed another unarmed black teenager and some 783 miles northwest of Selma, in Norman, Oklahoma, a YouTube video went viral exposing tuxedo-clad white frat boys chanting a bus-trip song about racial exclusion and lynching.

The lyrics to the song were not exactly surprising, considering that Sigma Alpha Epsilon is 159 years old and is the only national fraternity founded in the Antebellum South. The fraternity boasts on its website that during the Civil War 92 percent of SAE members fought for the Confederate states.

In case you missed the video or didn’t catch the lyrics, here they are in all of their good ol’ boy, old-fashioned, garden-variety racist glory:

"There will never be a ni**** in SAE.

There will never be a ni**** in SAE.

You can hang him from a tree, but he can never sign with me

There will never be a ni**** in SAE."

I find this alarming because this isn’t a bunch of curmudgeonly, bitter old white men hating on hope and change but young guys who are white America’s future. After these frat boys graduate from college, they’ll move on into the corporate pipeline where some day some of them will have the power to hire and fire with “there will never be a ni**** “ playing like the soundtrack to their lives in their heads.

The SAE chanters may represent a throwback to mid-century American racism, but times have changed. Rather than stonewall the Unheard, a group of Black student activists at OU who had learned of the video and posted it online, or buy time with a three-month investigation, David Boren, the university president, immediately shut the fraternity down.

The national headquarters of SAE, which prides itself in having a membership of “gentlemen and leaders.” followed Boren’s lead and immediately suspended the OU chapter.

With no blood thirsty state troopers or Selma police waiting to do battle, what was supposed to be a march was so well attended by so many movers and shakers that it turned into an extravaganza. Not only was America’s current president there but also former President George W. Bush, along with Capitol Hill lawmakers galore.

It was plainly easier to take photo-ops than it has been to pass a new voter’s rights law that would repair the damage the five right wing activists on the Supreme Court did two years ago to the 1965 Voting Rights Act. By a 5-4 vote, the Supreme Court ruled that southern states that had historically suppressed the Black vote no longer had to prove they were no longer suppressing the Black vote. Since then, southern states like Texas has come up with all sorts of creative, new-fangled ways to diminish the number of Blacks and Browns casting their votes at the ballot box.

We can vote now but we can’t stop the unjustifiable killings of black men and boys by frightened or ferocious cops.

Even with the “Black Lives Matter” and “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot” protests becoming this generation’s civil rights movement, policemen across the nation continue to create more martyrs.

Friday night a Madison policeman shot Tony Robinson, an unarmed biracial teen, five times in the chest. The 19-year-old Robinson had a file on his with a conviction last year for armed robbery and a diagnosis that he suffered from attention-deficit disorder and anxiety and depression.

Officer Matt Kenny, a 12-year veteran, has been put on paid administrative leave while the Wisconsin Department of Justice investigates the Robinson’s death. Kenny was involved in another fatal shooting in 2007, that was found justified; a so-called suicide by cop case.

So while Selma was throwing a grand party, 2,000 protesters, mainly Wisconsin students, have been peacefully marching in Madison while chanting, “Black lives matter.”

March 04, 2015

Chicago's mayoral run-off election on April 7 looks like it may be too close to call. VOTE--Voice of the Ex-Offenders--plans to make its presence felt in the election. Whether the organization pulls it off or not is worth watching. Here's my March 4, 2015 Chicago Defender column on the election and VOTE.

Will ex-offenders be on offensive for April’s Run-off?

Monroe Anderson

DEFENDER COLUMNIST

If community activist Ziff Sistrunk’s plan is well laid, Chicagoans who did time for breaking the law may be the decisive players in determining who makes some of the city’s laws in the future.

Along with mayoral candidates, Rahm Emanuel and Jesus “Chuy” Garcia, a record number of aldermen—more than a third—are in next month’s run-off election. As of now, all bets are off regarding who will be the winners and losers after the votes are counted.

By the time the tallying is done, and all the talking points about law and order and budget balancing are delivered, Sistrunk says he wants to make sure that both mayoral candidates and the 19 aldermanic candidates have addressed one other subject: What to do about Chicago’s neglected population of ex-offenders.

That’s what to do with them, not to them. This ambitious plan is not one of those “keep an eye on them so we can catch them before they violate again.” It’s one that recognizes that ex-offenders paid their debt to society and ought to be given a fair shake and full participation in what those of us who have walked the straight and narrow take for granted.

Sistrunk says his organization, VOTE—Voice of the Ex-Offenders, has already launched what it’s calling the “X-Offenders 6:45 A.M. Movement.” Forty-five minutes after the polls open at 6 a.m. on April 7, the mission is to have 50,000 ex-cons standing first in line just itching to vote for the candidate who has pledged to look out for them.

To pull this off, Sistrunk says he has recruited 50 ex-offenders to round up 1000 voters in each of Chicago’s 50 wards. The end result is to have 50,000 voters across the city making a political point.

Voter turnout could even be greater since an ex-con exercising his civic duty presumably would bring his family and friends along, reversing the poor participation the city experienced during last week’s election.

Since he was released from Pontiac prison nearly four decades ago after doing two and a half years for armed robbery, Sistrunk, who is the director of the South Side’s Kirby Puckett Youth Center, has taken on his fair share of quixotic challenges. For example, along with perennial candidate William “Dock” Walls, in 2007, Sistrunk was briefly a mayoral challenger to Mayor Richard M. Daley until he failed to get the 12,500 signatures he needed to get on the ballot. Three years ago, Sistrunk was one of the supporters outside Rod Blagojevich’s house protesting the stiff sentencing on the last day of the governor’s freedom.

In five short weeks, we’ll know if the community activist is better at organizing than he is at pipe dreaming. I’m hoping that Sistrunk’s for real and has real skills to galvanize and mobilize ex-offenders that get them out to vote. There’s a real need. Ex-offenders remain second-class citizens in America. In Illinois, they can’t live in public housing, can’t coach your kid in Little League and can’t work for the city or state.

Nationally, it’s worse. If you did the crime, then do the time, you still can’t vote.

An estimated 5.8 million Americans are prohibited from casting a ballot by state law because of current or previous felony convictions. “That’s more than the individual populations of 31 U.S. states,” U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder said last month in a speech to the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights at Georgetown University Law Center. “And although well over a century has passed since post-Reconstruction states used these measures to strip African Americans of their most fundamental rights, the impact of felony disenfranchisement on modern communities of color remains both disproportionate and unacceptable.”

The war on drugs and the creation of the Prison Industrial Complex has compounded this discriminatory development. Under the Obama Administration, federal life sentences have fallen dramatically from 280 in fiscal year 2009 to 153 in 2013 and according to a report released Monday, but three-fourths of federal life sentences are given to minorities and the bulk are for non-violent drug offenses. Although the report didn’t say why there are fewer life sentences now than before Obama was sworn in, it’s more than likely because five years ago the president signed a bill narrowing the crack and powder cocaine sentencing disparity from 100:1 to 18:1 and for the first time eliminates the mandatory minimum sentence for simple possession of crack cocaine.

More work needs to be done. Since Illinois is one of only 16 states where ex-offenders can vote, it makes sense to make that vote count here.

Sistrunk says he wants to make sure that opportunities abound for ex-offenders. Come April 7, he will have a chance to prove that he can deliver. If he doesn’t, it will be an opportunity missed.

February 26, 2015

For the past Century, Hollywood and African Americans have had a star-crossed relationship with the movie industry waging an image war against Blacks. Here's my Chicago Defender column on this sad situation.

Selma boycotted but Hollywood still got Glory

Monroe Anderson

Defender Columnist

Hollywood’s snub of the very important Black film, Selma, about the extremely important march to demand voting rights for African Americans 50 years ago, was so absurd, so ironic, that it was joke worthy.

On cue, Host Neil Patrick Harris literally opened Sunday night’s 87th Academy Awards show with this pale one-liner: “The best and the whitest...sorry brightest.”

It was a feeble attempt to sugar coat the bitter truth. Although the president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Cheryl Boone Isaacs, is a Black woman, the actors nominated for best performances this year were all white.

The Blacks-are not-worthy judgement was determined by the Academy voters who are 94 percent white. Last month’s Golden Globe Awards paid a little homage at least. David Oyelowo’s brilliant performance as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Ava DuVernay inspired direction at least garnered two nominations.

“Why are we still begging white people for approval?” asks Sergio Mims, who writes for a Black film website, Shadow and Act, and is a co-founder of Chicago’s Black Harvest Film Festival, before shrugging off the Oscars brush off as no big deal.

Mims might be right. There are the obvious bragging rights, but there is no guarantee that an Oscar will get an actor more work or a higher salary.

And long after all the sound and the fury over this year’s Oscars have come and gone, the real action will remain where it already is: at home on our big flat-screen TV sets.

Going out to see a movie, with servings of popcorn, soda and candy, can cost a family of four as much as $80 so we’re staying away in droves. According to a CBS News Poll, 84 percent of Americans see movies at home, four percent at the theater and 10 percent pretty much divided between home and the theaters.

Television is also giving the theatrical movies a run for the fame and fortune as far as actors and producers are concerned.

More than two and a half viewers watched Laurence Fishburne’s Hannibal every week as the veteran Black actor pulled down $175,000 per episode. Fishburne is also a co-star along with Anthony Anderson on the TV sitcom, Black-ish. He and Anderson are also producers..

Producer Lee Daniel’s new drama, Empire, starring Terrence Howard and Taraji P. Henson, has been building its viewership from week to next. The Hip-Hop mogul show, which MSNBC’s Melissa Harris-Perry summed up as a combination of Breaking Bad, Glee, House of Cards and The Real Housewives, is the new “it” show for Black viewers.

Since she created Grey’s Anatomy, Writer and Producer Shonda Rhimes has her own cottage industry on network TV with Private Practice and Scandal. She is also an executive producer on How to Get Away with Murder, the new TV drama that last month earned the show’s star, Viola Davis, a Screen Actors Guild Award.

More than nine and a half million viewers watch Kerry Washington’s Scandal religiously. She reportedly earns $150,000 per show which means no one’s going to be throwing a rent party for her anytime soon. But, this is where the money gets really funny. While the audience for ratings champion, The Big Bang theory, is twice that of Scandal, all three of the white stars, Jim Parsons, Kaley Cuoco, Johnny Galecki are paid $1 million each per episode.

That’s entertainment. Hollywood won’t be winning many awards for treating African Americans fairly over the past century. America’s movie industry has been waging an image war on Blacks since D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation first hit movie theaters 100 years ago. Griffith’s movie, originally named The Clansmen, espoused white supremacy while glorifying the KKK. One scene features white actors in blackface who are supposed to be newly elected Black legislators during Reconstruction, sitting around, barefoot, eating chicken, drinking whiskey and recklessly eyeballing white women.

Donald Bogle’s, Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks: An Interpretive History of Blacks in American Films, pretty much sums up much of Hollywood’s presentation of Blacks well into the 1980s.

It’s that history and what took place on the Pettus Bridge that brought tears to some in the audience as they watched John Stephens and Lonnie Lynn-- aka John Legend and Common--perform, and later accept Oscar for Best Original song, Glory.

“We know that right now the struggle for freedom and justice is real. We live in the most incarcerated country in the world,” Legend said during their acceptance speech. “There are more black men under correctional control today than were under slavery in 1850. When people are marching with our song, we want to tell you that we are with you, we see you, we love you, and march on.”

Common and Legend are right on. The struggle continues. But every now and then, we do get to witness some glory.

February 11, 2015

If anything can that raise a Republican’s ire almost as much as a Black man in the White House, it’s labor unions.

So few should have been surprised when the new Republican governor of Illinois, Bruce Rauner, came up with an ingenious initiative to further weaken the state’s labor unions.

During last week’s State of the State address, Rauner said he would like to see “empowerment zones” in counties across the state where voters would decide whether unions could exist and workers should be obligated to pay associated dues. Given the governor’s party affiliation and the fact that he’s a one percenter, it’s easy to guess who he is zeroing in on empowering and who he’s zoning out.

Making the standard-issue, corporation-coddling Republican argument that the smaller the union presence, the greater the number of jobs, on Monday, Rauner signed Executive Order 15-13, which denies labor the right to deduct dues from state employees who benefit from union activities but don’t want to pay to support them.

As our newly constituted Congress is reaffirming, Republicans may be lousy at governing but they are masters of code wording, dog whistling and name-calling.

When the GOP set out to do some serious union busting by stripping organized labor of its funding, power and influence, for example, the words destruction and dismemberment were spoken mainly in quiet rooms while those southern states and Midwestern ones where Republicans ruled went about their dirty deeds. Instead, Republicans insisted these would be “right-to-work” states.

Rauner is just the latest of Republican governors, who after immediately taking office, has made it his mission to kneecap the unions. Republican Gov. Rick Snyder was not halfway through his first term when he signed a bill making Michigan the 24th right to work state in the nation. Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker has forged his anti-union alchemy into gold by cutting the collective bargaining rights of most of his state’s public unions and transforming himself into one of the current shiny objects among the potential 2016 Republican presidential nominee contenders.

Like Rauner, both Walker and Snyder asserted that their union body slams would mean more jobs for their states. So far, the reasons for Michigan’s modest job increases are debatable and Wisconsin’s job growth has been so slow that Walker grasped at one of the right wing’s threadbare straws blaming it on Obamacare.

Union jobs have always been considered “good jobs.” They have also been good for America. Whether it’s the 40-week, paid vacation, pensions, health insurance or higher wages, over the decades labor unions are directly and indirectly responsible for raising the standard of living for millions but cutting into the precious bottom lines of corporations as people and the people who over-reward themselves for running them. Labor unions also fail to endear themselves with Republicans by being important campaign contributors for the Democrats.

Unfortunately, for Black Americans, we find ourselves between the labor unions and a Republican place.

One out of every five working Blacks are government employees, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, When the Republican’s national obsession with austerity was running at fever pitch six years ago, governors across America reduced their state’s payroll through mass layoffs of state employees. African Americans, who are overwhelmingly Democrat, took a disproportionate hit, becoming the most fired and at risk of being the least rehired.

From the beginning of the Great Migration until now, it’s been a continuous struggle for African Americans in Chicago to get either contractors or the labor unions to cut them in on the action. When black skilled craftsmen, who had come from generations of bricklayers from the south, moved north, by edit, union bosses blocked them from working on the best jobs.

History has stubbornly repeated itself. Lilly-white trade unions have been as much a part of the wink and nod society as the boardrooms they take on. Both have been almost exclusively populated with white men. Both have been perfectly satisfied with that chummy arrangement for far too long.

Even now, too often when you see construction companies at work on big projects throughout Chicago, you don’t see a crew that looks like the residents of the city. Even with the implementation of set-aside programs, you don’t see big black construction firms getting their fair share of the jobs.

Of course all unions are not alike but the battle between the governor and the unions may not be an easy one for Blacks in Illinois to join. It may simply be a case of going with the devil we knew or the devil we’re getting to know.